Privilege Management Infrastructure for Virtual Organizations in Healthcare Grids

This paper is focused on the management of virtual organizations (VO) inside healthcare environments where grid technology is used as middleware for a healthcare services-oriented architecture (HSOA). Some of the main tasks considered for the provision of an efficient VO management are management of users, assignation of roles to users, assignation of privileges to roles, and definition of resources access policies. These tasks are extremely close to privilege management infrastructures (PMI), so we face VO management services as part of the PMI supporting access control to healthcare resources inside the HSOA. In order to achieve a completely open and interoperable PMI, we review and apply standards of security and architectural design. Moreover, semantic technologies are introduced in decision points for access control allowing the management of a high degree of descriptors by means of ontologies and infer the decision making through rules and reasoners.